Demand at the National Grid

Technology issues at the National Grid web site, it would seem, according to the 60 second page load times and resulting SQL Server/ASP.NET errors pictured right. (Click to zoom)

The culprits are the semi-interesting real-time electricty demand graphs on the site. Apart from the error pictured, another strange point is that they have the graphs set to auto-refresh every 15 seconds, which seems more than a little excessive. You would hope there would also be some kind of caching in effect, especially for the 8 day graph, but it doesn’t seem that way from the current behaviour of the site – every hit to the page seems to hit the database again, and although the graph is ultimately just an image, problems with it block the whole page load. I just hope they’re doing a better job with the elect…..